Week 1: Wired PCVR

It is only the first week of 2026, but it already feels like a lifetime has passed! 🌍 Between the whirlwind of global news and finishing my German AI exam, it’s been intense. I walked away with a C—and honestly, I’ll take it. I worked incredibly hard, and I’ve realized there are so many more technical resources available in German compared to Russian or Estonian. 📚🤖

The Quest for a Better Link 🔗

This week, I focused on optimizing my Virtual Desktop setup for wired PCVR. Over the last year, I’ve noticed the official Meta Link App becoming painfully slow. I’m not sure if it’s a memory leak in the Meta software, Windows, or somewhere else, but the performance hit is massive. It’s reached a point where I can’t run anything else while Link is streaming—which is a total nightmare when you’re trying to develop in Unity. 🛠️🔋

Finding the Workaround: Gnirehtet & RT-RP

Virtual Desktop was the very first app I bought on the Horizon Store. Back then, I didn’t have the hardware to handle official streaming, and while it works great, it usually requires a robust Wi-Fi network. 📶

I recently stumbled upon a Reddit thread about using adb to build a reverse proxy for a wired connection. I first tried Gnirehtet, but the Rust version was a bit buggy for me—the stream would drop connection intermittently. 🐛

However, I found a wrapper called RT-RP. It utilizes the Java version of Gnirehtet, and it actually works! ✅

⚠️ The “Unity Workaround”

I did encounter one specific quirk: the Unity Editor tends to kill the connection if you don’t follow a specific sequence. If you want to develop without crashes, follow this order:

1. Open the Unity Editor first. 💻
2. Open Virtual Desktop on your headset. 🥽
3. Start the RT-RP service. ⚡
4. Ensure SteamVR is set as your default OpenXR environment.

It’s a bit of a “jank” setup, but once it’s running, the stability is so much better than the official Link app! 🎮✨